My rite of passage as a senior developer included starting to ask myself the question: does activity X really move the project forward?

But there's another side to this, of which management is often not made aware of: in longer projects people tend to accumulate, for lack of a better word, "rituals" - stuff that's done manually, even though it should've been automated or dropped.

These are insidious, because they slow down work, introduce inconsistencies (sometimes even errors), but are largely ignored.

And for some reason the arrogant, disobedient, oddly-shaped person is the only one noticing it.

From almost every place I worked at I only stay in touch with one person - that person.